Introduction

Recently HIS sent us the Radeon 7850 and we found it had a solid bang for the buck. People who want to play games with maxed out settings were able to hang with the big boys despite the price being roughly half as much.

Well, HIS has sent us the Radeon 7870 to review now. This card is right above the 7850 in performance and in price.  You pay a little more, but you also get that better performance.

While the other cards have been voltage-control free and more targeted toward limited overclocking, this 7870 has voltage control included! That means if you can keep the card cool enough you should be able to achieve some massive overclocks.

The Radeon 7870 supports tons of cool features such as DirectX 11, OpenCL 1.1, DirectCompute 11, Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling,UVD 3 dedicated video playback accelerator,AMD HD3D technology,DisplayPort 1.2,HDMI 1.4a,Dual-link DVI with HDCP,VGA, and many other features.

We'll be testing the HIS Radeon 7870  on the socket 2011 test rig, which consist of the following  Intel Core i7 - 3930K @ 3.5ghz (LGA 2011), Asus Rampage 4 Extreme motherboard, 4x2gb of Corsair Dominator GT memory, Custom water loop cooler and an Antec 1200w Quattro power supply.

Enough of all the pleasantries, and lets get down to business!

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